The carefully planned strategy you have implemented on your website requires a regular audit. If you are contemplating whether to do it or not, the answer is to do it. You must have spent months planning the right strategy and money to implement on your website.
Now, if you do not do the most important step, that is the audit, the whole hard work will go to waste. Many SEO companies in Dubai provide services that include a regular website audit to find out the performance of websites. It helps to drive traffic and sales to the websites and businesses respectively.
The website audit not only checks the SEO but also the traffic, design, content, whole UI UX, attractiveness, appeal, lead generation of the website, etc. The website audit will tell you whether the current and implemented strategies are working for the website or not and if you need to change them or not.
When you audit websites, you are evaluating the usability and other content to figure out their effectiveness.
What is a Website Audit?
A website audit analyzes and assesses the current performance of a page before implementing any fully planned and extensive strategy. It helps digital marketers carefully examine the state of a website to see if the current strategy is working or not.
This evaluation will help digital marketers in deciding a new course of action regarding the strategies to be used and implemented.
So, what does a website audit check?
Below mentioned is a website audit checklist:
Lead Generation Audit
Simply put, a lead generation audit checks any potential prospects and converts them into leads that are interested in the products or services of your business.
Albeit conventional but keywords are still in the race of getting a particular content optimized. Your keywords should be heavily researched based on their appropriate usage of them according to your industry. Look for keywords that are valued and top-searched in your industry. Also, try to use keywords that are most relevant to your business.
Call-to-action is extremely important in lead generation. Your website should have a clear call to action button that is easily visible whenever someone visits your website. It can be a button, link, social media message, etc.
In addition to this, do not clutter your website with multiple call-to-action buttons. This will easily frustrate your audience. Instead, use a single call-to-action button that is powerful enough to attract the visitor.
Auditing websites with fully thought-out strategies will provide accurate feedback about your website.
Website Navigation Audit
The navigation of your website should be user-friendly to provide visitors with a good experience. The tabs and buttons on your page and the overall content available should be easily available to your audience.
If you have a newsletter or some portfolio to download, they should be downloaded effortlessly. Focus on the optimization of your site to see if it provides maximum usability.
If your website has errors in loading or is cluttered with content, it would not present a clean look nor would it provide a good navigation experience. The more visitors your website have, the more it can convert potential leads into customers.
When you are auditing your website, consider these things:
- Not too many CTAs
- Easy checkout or payment options
- Simple design and layout of the website
- Evenly placed content
Make sure that you are easily providing the information that your audience needs. Your audience should be able to find everything with effortless clicks and on separate tabs.
UI UX and Design Layout Audit
The visuals of your website are the first thing that any visitor will look at. It takes less than a second for any visitor to find either your website appealing or not.
Try to keep a simple look with unique and elegant designs. This will give a calm image to your website and that will result in attracting your audience.
Since there is a modern trend of using minimal design layouts and pastel colors, it would benefit you more to follow that approach. People are more likely to visit your website if it provides a serene and calm look.
In addition to this, white space or black space is quite the rage today, so it would immediately optimize your website if you use this theme. Your audience will find the website attractive since it is up-to-date.
The human mind is thoroughly influenced by the blend of different colors and designs. You can use that information and manipulate it by making a likable design layout and UI UX that will appeal to your visitors.
If you audit a website on a regular and scheduled basis, you can eliminate any long-term issues. This also helps in keeping up with every trend and satisfying the ever-changing needs of your target audience.
The more complex design or colors you choose, the more it will be difficult for you to retain the attention of the visitors. While doing your website audit, you must focus on making the site look extremely pleasant to capture the attention of your visitors.
Website Speed Audit
Time is valuable for people and they are impatient too. Let’s face it, any website that does not load in the blink of an eye will cause users to leave it.
For this, you need to make sure that your website is fast loading and optimized. Only this way, you can make sure that they will reach a higher amount of visitors and have engagements and conversions.
From the loading of the website to every tab that is available on it, the website speed audit includes everything that showcases a click button. Focus on making sure that when your user clicks on a particular button or tab on your website, the next page that opens should load effortlessly and in no time.
When you conduct an audit of your website, the top priority should include the ease of the website for users. How easily your site visitors can switch between pages or open different tabs from your website etc, are the first thing that can convince a visitor to stay on your website.
Content Audit
While the layout designs, color schemes, and speed of the website are important, the content present on your website is equally important if you want your visitors to convert into customers.
The products you offer or the services you provide should be listed clearly and in detailed descriptions on your website.
The content has some really important responsibilities to attract visitors. It should not be irrelevant or copy-pasted from some other website. These are some of the biggest no-nos when you are structuring your content. It will not only repel your audience but you will also lose credibility in their eyes.
Here are some points that you need to consider during your website audit:
- The most important content or information should be placed at the top of the page
- The whole hierarchy of the page should be aligned and in a concrete sequence that explains your visitors about your business
- Design should be simple that can attract visitors and make them stay to learn more about your business
- Color schemes and design layouts should include modern and elegant patterns and strokes
- Do not litter your website with unnecessary content. Instead, focus on simple themes and details
- Put appropriate design breadcrumbs on your website that will further ensure the feasibility of your website
- Use footer links that are important in SEO since they include different ranking factors. For example, Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Copyright, etc
- Call-to-action buttons should be placed appropriately and should not be too many. It should be placed at the beginning of the website for maximum effect
- The website should align across all devices. It should be the same for mobile phones, laptops, desktops, etc
The content of your website has the potential to engage your target audience for a longer time. It makes sense that the content has to be extremely relevant and of good quality to achieve that.
Carefully curated content can have a higher chance of increasing conversions.
Quality Audit
The overall content and designs you have presented on your website should be of top-notch quality. This can only be ensured if you audit the quality of the website regularly.
What do your visitors feel during their interaction with your website? Do they have a memorable experience while visiting your website?
You can make certain that the quality of your website is good by regularly checking it. Compare your website with other websites in the same industry. See if there is any difference. Check the traffic of other websites. If they have more regular traffic than you, it means they are providing their audience with something better than you.
Here are some ways to provide good quality to your website:
- Think about your audience and what they expect from your website
- Provide step by step guide to navigate your website
- The content presented on your website should be aligned with the needs of your target audience
- Design, color themes, and layout should be up-to-date and modern to give optimum experience to your audience
By fulfilling the above-mentioned concerns, you are eliminating any issues that can irritate your audience. This way, you are providing a great experience to your visitors. It will surely help in increasing the conversion rate of your website.
Conversion Potential Audit
Your website should have the potential to have conversions and if it does not, you need to conduct a thorough audit to know the reason.
If your website does not even contain appropriate and relevant content to have conversion potential, you need to think about altering your strategy.
When you conduct an audit of your conversion potential, think about the prospect of it bringing long-term results. Do not think of it as a one-time investment. Instead, think about the results that you can bring about for a prolonged time.
Any marketing offer, free quotation, landing page, and call-to-action are surefire ways that can bring traffic and conversions to your website.
The focus is to create content that is engaging enough to keep your target audience committed to your website. If you just focus on converting leads and leaving the audience behind once you get sales out of them, it will be a one-time thing only.
Your target audience will get frustrated over the fact that they are not satisfied enough after sales. That is why you must gather all the data that is relevant from your target audience and use it to create content that can engage your audience in the long term.
To conduct a conversion audit, think about the following questions:
- What conversion opportunities do you have on your website and where are they placed?
- Are your value offerings different for different target markets or is there a solo strategy for everyone?
- Do you use the call-to-action button in an effective manner that promises fruitful results?
- How often do you see profitable results from your website?
- How well is the optimization of your landing page?
These aforementioned questions will help you in making the best use of the provided options on your websites. Through this, you can achieve the satisfaction of your target audience.
SEO Audit
Search engine optimization is an integral part of getting conversions from a website. It helps by using keywords and other strategies to bring more traffic to your website.
SEO auditing is a huge part of bringing organic traffic to your website and better sales to your business.
SEO services include but are not limited to providing the correct use of relevant keywords, headings, and content that can achieve constructive results for your website.
There are some prominent SEO elements that you should consider:
- Use appropriate and relevant keywords, headings, and subheadings. The URL should also have any top keywords related to your business
- Install a tracking tool to constantly monitor your website
- Do not use resources or ads at the very top of your website as visitors can leave the site instantly
- Put thoroughly researched and concise meta tags and meta descriptions. Other things to consider are image tags, title tags, description tags, etc
- Remove any broken links from your website
- Insert internal links where they are most beneficial and can urge the audience to visit them. Do not litter your website with links that can make your website heavy to load or affect the navigation of the website
- Regularly check the access of search engines to your website and indexing. It will tell you how search engines view your website. This will help Google to crawl your website and rate it. Since this step is pretty difficult, it will take the aid of a programmer to accomplish it.
SEO not only helps in driving traffic to your website but also targets the sources where they come from.
Through the use of SEO, you can accurately understand the related searches regarding your business. This way, you can improve your content, tags, and keywords to drive more traffic to your website.
SEO is the oldest trick in the marketing book and is used by many businesses to increase their conversion rate.
Social Media Audit
An additional plus point to a website of a business is its social media presence. A business can attract its target audience through social media if you use it correctly.
A strong social media presence helps in engaging the audience and attracting potential customers.
Like everything else, social media also has an audit checklist that you should follow:
- Post content according to a schedule and interact with your audience
- Announce any new products and services
- Keep posting the link to your website on your social media captions
- Mention any new option launched on your website across all your social media platforms
- Embed your social media icons on your website
Following these steps will help in driving traffic to your website. Many businesses do not integrate social media with their websites and that is their biggest mistake.
If you have a social media presence, use it to your advantage by using it to connect with your target audience in a better way.
Using social media with the combination of a website can have a great impact on your target audience. It is like hitting them from both sides to have maximum effect.
Through this, you can increase the chances of your conversion rate.